Apocalypse City at A Weekend with Good Friends

This weekend (starting Thursday night my time) was the usually biannual A Weekend with Good Friends, an online convention on the Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord. I've played in a few of these before, and now, for the first time, I ran my own game. It was the second run of my Apocalypse City concept, and it was also very enjoyable for me, as well as for the players. They found the concept compelling, even though they wished they could play more of the playbooks.

One thing I noticed happening this time is that I was able to use an interstitial break to work on fleshing out some threats based on NPCs coming from one of the players' resources. This made some dynamics a lot easier to work with, and is closer to Vincent Baker's suggestion of breaking the game down into three sub-sessions, although I wasn't able to get there. I also had to have an actual conversation about the Special Moves, explaining what I think they are meant to do, and why to me it felt like it's better to not dwell on them for a convention game. I tried allowing for enough experience points to provide opportunities for advancement, but that didn't pan out.

In terms of prep, I decided to let the players decide whether and what kind of gang or group they were, and as for the pre-existing threats, I took a bit of inspiration from my trip to Van Cortlandt and other urban parks, as well as some folk horror when characterizing the denizens of what I called Rural Experience Park.

Like the first time I ran this, it all ended in total war between the group of PCs and another gang, which they were able to eliminate. This time they were even able to make another gang join them up without killing them all, which was nice. But the park was set on fire, and would probably in the fiction be completely ruined at this point. I don't know why exactly that is. Did I make the starting situation too violent? Did I make the opposition too easily suppressed through combat? Did I not go hard enough to make non-violent alternatives more appealing? Or maybe I should run this with more playbooks that add NPCs tied to the players, or play those much more seriously when they do come up?

It could also be that, as I said in the previous post, a lot of the potential for the game is lost when it's run as a con game. Maybe it just needs the investment from the players to actually have a whole session creating characters, playing "a day in the life" for them, and then letting the MC build a compelling threat map at leisure.

Nevertheless, the affirmation that this is a premise whose appeal I can communicate to others through play made me very happy. Even if I don't go farther into this retro-futuristic 80s urban apocalypse, I hope this gave me the confidence to put more of my setting ideas out there as games for people to enjoy.